In 2018, China boasted a total synthetic rubber capacity of roughly 6,667kt/a, including 130kt/a new effective capacity. Considering capacity adjustment, China’s capacity of seven synthetic rubbers (BR, SBR, EPR, IIR, NBR, IR and CR) and styrene block copolymer (SBC) will ranged at estimated 6,870kt/a in 2019, 205kt/a of which will be newly added. But it is still very uncertain that the country’s several plants will be put into production as scheduled.

Over the past two years, China’s synthetic rubber market sustained steady growth as a pickup in price among other factors prompted some synthetic rubber plants to resume production after being out of operation for years. China’s output of synthetic rubber reached 5,787,000 tons in 2017, up 6.0% from a year ago before climbing to 6,123,000 tons in 2018, and will expectedly hit 8,110,000 tons in 2023, at a growth rate of around 6% during 2018-2023.

Styrene butadiene rubber (SBR) and butadiene rubber (BR) are the two most common synthetic rubbers in China, with capacity respectively accounting for 32.1% and 25.8% of the country’s total synthetic rubber capacity in 2018. With the largest output among main synthetic rubbers, SBR and BR seized a combined 32.4% share of China’s total synthetic rubber output in 2017. But their production growth slowed down evidently, while special rubber products like ethylene propylene rubber (EPR) and nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR) began to boom, especially the fastest-growing EPR whose output jumped by 29.5% to 202,600 tons in 2018.

In 2018, China’s import and export of main synthetic rubbers dropped differently, for example, BR imports and exports fell by 27.1% and 8.5% in the first eleven months of 2018 to 181,600 tons and 31,400 tons from the prior-year period, respectively. Slowing downstream demand was at play in the situation; another cause was the escalating trade tensions between China and America from March 2018: almost all of China’s products in the synthetic rubber industry chain were on the list of America’s tariffs on USD200 billion of Chinese goods. Although both countries had agreed to suspend tariff increase in late 2018, it still hurt China’s imports and exports of synthetic rubber products.

Moreover, Chinese producers tried hard and invested heavily to develop new products in recent years, having made some breakthroughs. Examples include PetroChina’s successful commissioning of self-developed high-strength SBR, SSBR2060 in its Dushanzi Refinery in July 2018; PetroChina Jilin Petrochemical Research Institute’s accomplishment of optimization test of self-developed high-strength SBR, SBR1566 in November 2018 and its successful development of a new ethylene propylene rubber (EPR), X-0150 in the same month.

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